United Parcel Service Inc. has for decades been the company that delivers packages to your doorstep with its signature brown trucks, but the company has quietly begun expanding into drone delivery.

The UPS Foundation announced Monday it has entered into a partnership with drone startup Zipline and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to deliver blood for transfusions by drone throughout Rwanda. UPS offered an $800,000 grant to kick off the deliveries.

Drone delivery of blood has the potential to be a life-saving technology, particularly in Rwanda, where roads often wash out and it can be impossible to quickly get medical supplies to more rural areas. A drone can carry just over 3 pounds of weight over a distance of 75 miles round-trip.

Sally French, MarketWatch

With endorsement from the Rwandan government, Zipline is going to start making as many as 150 blood deliveries a day from its central base in western Rwanda to 21 transfusing facilities within about a 37-mile radius. Zipline aims to be within a 30-minute delivery radius of 11 million Rwandan citizens by the end of 2016.

“This is an elegant solution to a difficult problem,” said Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “This would have been great in the Ebola outbreak, when we actually had a boat delivering vaccines because of the poor road infrastructure.”

Sally French, MarketWatch

The medical supplies are delivered in a box that parachutes down from the airplane. The boxes can land in a predetermined spot with an accuracy area the size of about 3 parking spaces.

UPS Foundation President Ed Martinez says UPS’s role is in supply-chain consulting on such issues as managing shipments and handling of equipment.

“We’re traditionally a company of trucks and warehouses and people,” UPS Foundation President Ed Martinez said.

Sally French, MarketWatch

The drone catapults into the air, flying at speeds of about 60 miles per hour.

Zipline competitors like Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup Matternet are taking a similar approach by carrying out drone deliveries to underdeveloped countries. Matternet CEO Andreas Raptopoulos told MarketWatch that in countries where there is a pressing need, regulatory hurdles are generally overcome more quickly.

Not to mention, more crowded airspace in the U.S. and strict laws around commercial drone operations make it nearly impossible to carry out a drone-delivery operation on a broad scale.

“You might think the first place this would happen is the U.S. or Europe, but the reality is Rwanda is on the cutting edge,” Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo said. “People in rural areas will receive the same access to medicine as people who live in cities.”

Amazon
AMZN, -0.13%
CEO Jeff Bezos told “60 Minutes” in 2013 that Amazon would be able to deliver using drones in the next four to five years—a goal that is looking increasingly impossible in the U.S. However, the Federal Aviation Administration did grant Amazon permission to begin testing a prototype in the U.S. in March 2015.

Sally French, MarketWatch

A Zipline drone is placed outside of a modified shipping container awaiting flight. The shipping containers serve as bases for Zipline and eventually could be brought to emergency zones around the world to deliver medical supplies.

“Rwanda has an amazing aircraft regulatory group,” Rinaudo said. “They move faster than the FAA. It’s not a lack of regulation, it’s just easier.”

Rwanda’s limited airspace activity has also enabled Zipline to set out predetermined flight routes for its drones that won’t conflict with commercial flights. Predetermining routes wouldn’t be viable for a hypothetical Amazon Prime Air service, in which drones would need to deliver directly to customers’ homes.

Here’s how Zipline works: A doctor sends a text message stating what type of blood they need to Zipline, which has a central base with two employees—one to manage all the drones and another to load the drones with supplies. When the Zipline center receives a delivery request, a worker immediately loads up the pouch of blood (and eventually vaccines or other medical supplies), enters in the drone’s destination, presses a button to launch it, and the drone flies to that medical center based on a predetermined route.

Sally French, MarketWatch

Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo holds open the contents of a delivery -- in this case a pouch of blood for transfusion.

The drone automatically sends a text message to the doctor a few minutes before its approach, and then drops the package outside over preset GPS coordinates. The drone then returns to its base for its batteries to be changed and to await its next delivery.

Sally French, MarketWatch

The operator can control the drone through an app.

The cost of a Zipline drone delivery in Rwanda is similar to what a delivery by car or boat would cost, but Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo says delivery by drone is 20 times faster.

Neither UPS nor Zipline have explicitly expressed the intention to carry out drone deliveries beyond medical-use cases or in developed economies, but the Rwanda project may prove an essential first step in testing out the technology.

“If we can be successful in this pilot, we can be successful in other parts of the world,” UPS’s Martinez said. “This is going to be a learning process for us.”

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